


Boundless

by justanotherStonyfan



Series: Banned Together Fills [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Bottom Steve Rogers, Consentacles, Eldritch, Kissing, M/M, Other, Relationship Negotiation, Sounding, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, references to past sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:15:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28847400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherStonyfan/pseuds/justanotherStonyfan
Summary: “Steve,” he says, and he goes to Steve, “happy might be a little outta my reach but there ain’t nowhere else I’d wanna be than with you.”The eldritch being that returned balance to the universe left fragments of itself in Steve. Luckily, Steve has someone who'll love all the pieces of him, and all the pieces of him will love Bucky in return.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Banned Together Fills [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1825168
Comments: 42
Kudos: 152
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Boundless

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to the fic I wrote for Halloween 2019, filling my free square for Banned Together Bingo 2020. I'm going with **weird sex for this one and it's (hopefully) part two of three, so let me know if you'd fancy a third part to round it all off.**

Bucky doesn't flinch when he Steve emerges, which is a fucking good move considering where Steve is, i.-fucking-e., Bucky’s fucking apartment, how the fuck. Except, it's not Steve, not really, is it? 

It looks like Steve, it stares at him like Steve stared at him, but something's wrong. Even though Bucky can't see it, he can _see_ it. His eyes are the same color but there's too much light in them. His skin is the same texture but it's too new. His hair is the same gold in the dimness of Bucky's little hideaway, but it's too real. 

Not to mention the fact that Steve would never have been able to blend into the Winter Soldier's shadows well enough to hide.

"How long have you been there?" Bucky asks it, and Steve looks at him in a way that makes it hard to look back.

He doesn't blink.

 _"I'm not sure,"_ it answers. _"Come home."_

And that, that's alarming, to say the least. Things like this thing mean something else when they say 'home,' when they ask you to go with them.

Its face is Steve's face, but pinched, the sockets dark, the cheeks a little thin. It's Steve's face but how Steve might look if he'd been through the war all over again, how Steve might look if he looked like Bucky feels. Tired. 

Old.

"I'm home already," Bucky says. "This is where I live. What do you want?"

 _"You,"_ it answers, the word quiet in a way that buzzes under Bucky's skin, its mouth barely moving, barely open.

"What are you?" Bucky says, and its brows draw together. 

_"It's me,"_ he says. _"Steve. You know me."_

Bucky blinks at it. It doesn't blink back.

"You look like Steve," he says. "I'll give you that. What do you want?"

 _"You,"_ it says again, but it moves forward this time, a step, hands lifting.

"Don't move," Bucky tells it. "I'll kill you, you won't even see me move."

And it…looks….okay, it looks upset about that, it uses Steve's kicked puppy expression. Which, aside from anything else, is cheating, but alright. 

"What are you?" he says again, and it puffs up its chest as it takes a breath, clenches its jaw.

 _"Buck, it's me,"_ it says, and that's-

Bucky feels the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

"No," Bucky tells him. "You _look_ like him, but you're not him, so what are you?"

It cocks its head, confused, Bucky can see as much in the creases of its forehead.

 _"Buck,"_ it says.

"Did Hydra send you?" Bucky asks, and its mouth drops open, its brow un-furrows and then-

Oh, shit, _that_ would fool him. Whatever its just done, _now_ Bucky can look at it, _now_ it would pass for Steve, even with Bucky.

"No," Steve says, and there's a little more expression in his- its expression, "no, Buck, it's me, it's _Steve_. I _am_ me."

There's no way to prove it, of course, not if it can do….whatever it was just doing with its being. Not if it can hide enough to catch the Winter Soldier by surprise. 

"You should go," Bucky tells it. "I don't want any trouble, and if you don't want any trouble then the best thing to do is go on existing away from each other, okay?"

"Buck," it says, and it sags, it looks sad. "Bucky please, I can't explain, I just-"

"You should go," Bucky tells it. "If you-"

But then something's wrong. For both of them, too - Bucky stops short mid-sentence because there's sound and movement he doesn't recognize, because something's wrong though he can't pinpoint it. _I need to get out of here._

 _It_ stops too, arrested - too still. Motionless, statue-like, Bucky can't hear it breathe, can't see its pulse. Its head turns like it’s on a servo, without any slowing down or speeding up, its eyes sweep left in smooth pursuit, without saccades. 

And then, _then_ , all hell breaks loose.

Or, at least, it _should._

In the few moments it takes for everything to happen, Bucky's mind doesn't make sense of everything until they're still again, but Steve grabs him - so fast Bucky doesn't see it, there's irony for you - and yanks him close as he steps backwards (somehow), turns them and moves them until they're stopped by the wall. It ought to knock the air out of Bucky’s lungs but it doesn't. And, in the same instant, Bucky's newspapered windows and scratched up old door come flying in, followed by flashbangs, but Bucky doesn't have time to get away or shield his face before…

Actually the…

The light isn't bright enough to hurt him, the noise not loud enough to hurt his super-serumed ears, how…?

 _"Be still,"_ It says, and there it is again, eyes that Bucky's eyes won't look at, he looks away before he even means to. 

They ought to be screwed anyway, because then the apartment is full of SWAT guys with guns, repeatedly yelling at, presumably, the two of them to get down on the ground. But there's two things that are really weird about that - the first is that Bucky doesn't even think of stepping out of the Steve-thing's arms to defend himself. 

The second is that every single one of the SWAT team bar one looks around like the place is empty, and the Steve-thing is looking out the corner of his eye at the one guy who's staring straight at him.

 _"Are you serious?"_ one of them says in Romanian. _"We saw him come in. We saw him come in! Dispatch, confirm target spotted entering building?"_

Bucky can't hear words in the response over the leader's earpiece, but he can hear the tone.

 _"Well he's not here now,"_ the leader says, and Bucky's incredulous but his main concern at the moment is the guy who's staring at them.

And then Steve turns his head and looks at the guy, unmoving, unblinking, just stares. 

Stares.

S t a r e s . . .

The guy turns around and lowers his weapon. The guy ignores them standing right there. The guy _deliberately physically puts his back_ to something that looks like Captain America, and the Winter Soldier, and Bucky gawps, he can't help it. 

"What the hell?" Bucky whispers, because if this thing can get a fully-armed SWAT member to stand down just by fucking _looking_ at him, Bucky's pretty sure whispering isn't going to be an issue.

He's right, too - Steve-thing just keeps staring at the back of the guy's head until the guy straight up leaves. He scrubs his hand over the back of his neck, shoulders flinching inward before he goes, too, while the rest of the SWAT team start to re-coordinate, like something’s hurting him, or weirding him out.

 _"We can't stay,"_ the thing tells him, except it's a voice Bucky's hearing without feeling it in his ears, _"they won't leave until they've searched the place."_

"Where d'you suggest we go, huh? Just walk right out?"

The Steve-thing turns its head back, and looks at a place on the wall right next to Bucky's right temple, and Bucky-

It's a good thing Bucky's body doesn't feel like moving because his stomach feels like it's trying to back out of his body via his kidneys and he's got no idea how he knows that's what it's trying to do but that's definitely what it is. In short, Bucky's so inherently relieved Steve-thing’s not looking straight at him that his tear-ducts sting with unshed tears. He's suddenly terrifyingly aware that he can't look at the Steve-thing directly, nor does he want the Steve-thing to look directly at him, either.

"Jesus," he says because he can’t bite it back, but it comes out a gasp as his gorge rises.

 _"Walk,"_ the Steve-thing says.

Bucky does.

With the Steve-thing’s hand on his shoulder, he walks, left, right, left, right, past the SWAT guys and his ruined apartment, past the remains of his door, past the one guy from the team who straight-up left, and the guy _shivers_ as they pass, sniffles as though he might be fending off tears.

Bucky can't blame him. 

His only regret is that he's leaving the journal behind - his jumbled web of memory and the tattered remains and scroungings of the things he's pieced together. Bus tickets, utility charges, leaflets, newspaper clippings. Where he's been and who he’s been since he's been human again.

He glances back over his shoulder as though he'd be able to call it to himself through desire alone. 

"I'll get it," the Steve-thing says, and Bucky feels a chill run down his spine - if this thing can read his mind, he doesn't want to be near it at all - but then it _puts him in an alcove_ and leaves and Bucky-

Christ, he's not even out of visual range of the goddamn SWAT guy!

But the SWAT guy doesn't look at him. In fact, the SWAT guy starts to turn towards him and then flinches with a rattle of his helmet against his collar, turning away again sharply, like someone’s shouted at him. The Steve thing is back in moments and _glares_ at the SWAT guy. The SWAT guy sobs once, and turns around to face the wall so fast he _klonks_ against the plaster with the peak of his helmet.

 _"Îmi pare rău!"_ he gasps, and pushes himself harder against the plaster.

The Steve-thing ignores him.

 _"Let's go,"_ he says, and hands Bucky his journal.

What the fuck, he hands Bucky his journal!?

"Where are we going?" Bucky says, and starts thinking about how to make his body do what he wants it to again.

Hydra _must_ have sent this thing, real Steve wouldn't make him do things he didn't want to do, wouldn't take control of his body and force it to walk by wrapping one massive hand around his bicep and moving him. Real Steve couldn't make Bucky do a goddamn thing he didn't want to at this point, nobody could except Hydra.

 _"We're leaving,"_ Steve-thing says, and so they do - down the spiral staircase, past Bucky's neighbors.

Some of them are on the landing staring upward at the commotion from the SWAT guys, not a one of them looks as he and the Steve-thing pass.

"Where are you taking me?" Bucky says. "Goddamn you, you want me to do what you want, have the guts to fight me-"

 _"I'm not trying to hurt you,"_ the Steve-thing answers. _"I'm not_ going _to hurt you. And I'll never guide your steps again but, Buck, if I don't help you outta here, the whole world's gonna be able to see you and_ they will _hurt you. Ain't nobody ever gonna hurt you again if I can help it but you gotta trust me-"_

"I don't gotta trust a goddamn thing!" Bucky yells, and he tries to stop but his legs keep walking. 

One of the people on the landing turns their head as he yells, but they don't turn it far enough to see. They turn it back instead, like they've forgotten what they were doing. 

_"Sam and Nat are in a car not far from here,"_ it says. _"The Falcon and the Widow, my friends."_

" _Steve's_ friends," Bucky answers. 

The sunlight is blinding compared to the dingy inside of his apartment block, and he staggers out into the street. They walk. People part for them and they do not slow. 

_"We're going down this alleyway,"_ the Steve-thing says, and then they go down the alleyway. 

Then Bucky can see a car - a fucking beetle, are you kidding? Props to this thing, Steve would be dumb enough to jack a beetle, that's a very Steve thing to do and then-

Okay, that is the Falcon. Bucky's memory lurches at the guy's face, scratches sideways to a car on a freeway, a runway high up in the clouds, kicking this guy off a-

That's not the Steve-thing, though. Bucky's memory just does that. Less these days, but still. And then the redhe-

Okay-

Okay, _Jesus Christ_ that's a lot of images. 

Primarily, though, what he gets is the knowledge that, yeah okay, these two look like the Falcon and the Widow. 

"You get your jackass?" the Falcon says, and suddenly it's like Bucky's had a corset removed, like he's taken off a too-tight hat, like he had broomsticks down his pants and now he can bend his knees again.

 _"Jesus!"_ he blurts, loudly, and all three of them give him a look.

The Steve-thing reaches out for him though, holds out both hands ready to catch him, one hand at his back, one hand in front of him. It doesn't touch, but Bucky knows at this point that it doesn't really need to. 

"Sorry," it says, "I'm sorry, Buck, I didn't mean-"

Finally, _finally_ Bucky can draw a knife. 

"A'right, hey!" the Falcon says, both hands up, palms towards him, the Steve thing does the same and backs off.

The Widow doesn't do it nearly as quickly - she lifts both hands as she leans her hip against the car, and that makes a lot of sense, actually, firstly she's showing him she's not threatened because second, she can take him. So he trusts at least that she's the Widow. 

The Falcon seems to be a pretty convincing Falcon, too, except that he remembers the Steve-thing being like a perfectly passable Steve.

Really, if he's being honest with himself, he ought to cut his own throat and have done with it so they can’t take him. Except, now he's alive, he kind of wants to keep on living. 

"You want me alive, you're gonna have a job on your hands," he says anyway, as darkly as he can.

The Steve-thing's shoulders sag, he looks pained.

"Buck," he says, takes an 'instinctive' step forward, and Bucky swings his arm out to get the knife closer to him.

All his other shit is still in his go bag in the apartment. At least he's got his journal. 

"What the fuck is going on," Bucky says, because it's only fair. "What the _fuck_ is going _on_!?"

"Easy," Falcon says, lifting his hands a little more. "We're friends, okay? I'm-"

"For fuck's sake, I know who you are, Wilson," Bucky tells him, watches his eyebrows raise before he glances at the Widow. "You too, both of you. But _this?"_

He gestures at the Steve-thing with his knife. 

"This thing can look like the way it feels if my eyeballs don't belong in my head," and Wilson makes a face and nods, acquiescing, so at least Wilson knows what the fuck Bucky's talking about, "and then look like the dude who peeled me off a table in forty-three, so what the fuck is it and why the fuck does it look like Steve and _how the fuck_ do I know _you two_ aren't made of the same batshit crazy?"

There's a pause, Bucky realizes. Quite a long one, actually, as his voice stops echoing off the walls of the alleyway, tinny and hysterical. He's the goddamn Winter Soldier for fuck's sake, stealth does not equal yelling in broad daylight less than a block from where a whole-ass SWAT team has invaded his home. 

"It's really me, Buck," Steve says, the Steve-thing says, and it's not fair, it isn't fair. "I don't know how to prove it to you."

"Yeah," Wilson confirms. "It's…a bit of a long story."

"Well I've got time," Bucky says, with no idea whether that's true or not, "so get talking."

And the Steve-thing hunches in on itself, looks at Wilson. It is still not blinking.

Wilson doesn't look at it. 

"I don't know how much you remember," Wilson tells him. "Project Insight, Hydra, all'a that."

"You mean the Master Plan," Bucky says. "I know the-"

Except he doesn't. There's a gaping hole in the memory that's come back and, now that he's had his attention drawn to it, he's horrified, astounded, incredulous that he's never felt it there before. 

He knows maybe seventy-five percent of the Master Plan, and yet here's a huge gap of…

It's not blackness.

It's worse than blackness.

"What the fuck," he whispers, and then he looks at Steve - the Steve-thing, which is busy being sad and looking like real Steve. "That- What am I-" and then he shakes his head. "What am I missing?" 

And the Steve-thing lifts its head and looks at him, without that too-muchness this time, and shows his palms, hands up, pleading, like a statue of the Madonna. 

"Me," he murmurs. 

And Bucky, for the first time since it stepped out of the shadows in his apartment, thinks it might be telling the truth.

~

They wait until dark. 

Bucky sits on the hood of the mini and smokes a cigarette, and Steve stands next to him and looks down the alleyway. Nobody who passes looks down it at them, not during the daylight, not when the oranges and purples of the evening subside into the cobalt of dusk, not when the deep navy of night creeps along cobbles touched by the gold of the light from the surrounding living spaces.

"Why did they come for me now?" Bucky asks, and Steve shakes his head. 

He's just Steve for now.

"FBI got a lead," he says. "I got a friend on the inside, tipped me off."

Bucky nods slowly.

That figures, it always happens eventually. 

"Where will you take me?" he says, and Steve shakes his head.

"I'm not taking you anywhere," he says. "You can come home with me if you want. Otherwise…" 

He lets the sentence die out into nothing. Otherwise, Bucky can continue to do what he's been doing - escaping by the skin of his teeth each time a new haven is compromised. 

"You won't follow me?" 

"Not if you ask me not to," Steve answers. "But I want to."

And…Okay, Bucky wasn't expecting that. That's a lot more forthright than he's ever heard from Steve - they danced around each other for years. 

"What you did before," Bucky says, and Steve looks at him in the dark.

Like this, he's a silhouette with the reflection of the end of Bucky's cigarette glowing in his eyes. 

"I'm sorry," he says. "It's the last thing I wanted to do. I didn't know they were coming so fast, I thought we had more time."

"Don't do it again," Bucky says. 

Don't take my body away from me, don't separate my self from my brain. 

"I won't," Steve tells him. "I won't, not ever, unless you ask me to. But if I had to do that over?" He nods towards the mouth of the alleyway. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat. We needed to get you out and there wasn't another way to do it."

Bucky _can_ acknowledge that it's true, but he won't. He's not giving in like that - it doesn't matter, he wants to shout. It's my autonomy, I'm my own responsibility. 

"And if you ever fucking read my mind again-"

"What?" Steve says. "I can't read your mind-"

"My journal," Bucky counters, and Steve frowns, Bucky's eyes are good enough with the serum that he can see the furrow deepen as his eyes adjust. 

"That wasn't mind-reading," Steve says. "It was on top of your fridge, I'd been in your apartment for like…hours? I think. I…I didn't see anything else I thought you could want."

That's right, Bucky thinks. Mainly because his bag is under the floorboards but also because there's nothing else of value in there. For a moment, he's not sure Steve understands that he wouldn't need anything expensive as long as he could call it his own, but then he remembers this is Steve. Steve who put newspapers in his shoes and walked holes into them because he couldn't afford the tram, Steve who'd eat one meal a day and then tell Bucky he wasn't hungry.

Bucky just nods, flicks his cigarette away into the dark. 

"Let's go," he says, but Steve shakes his head and straightens up.

"I'll go," he says. "It'll be faster that way."

And Bucky hates that he's right - his stomach lurches to watch Steve go off by himself. But then he finds he's looking at an empty alleyway, and so he suppresses a shiver and waits for Steve to come back instead. 

~

Stuffing them all into the beetle isn't as much effort as it should be. Bucky doesn't like how easily he and Steve fit in the _back_ , for fuck's sake. Romanov's in the front while Wilson drives, and okay, Bucky hasn't fit in easily. But Steve? Bucky can see him. Bucky can hear him and feel how warm he is but somehow he fits right there in the back next to him. 

Bucky tries to ignore it, for the most part, because his...

Is it possible that his skin doesn't like how it feels?

***

"This is your room," Steve says, staring at him without blinking as Bucky puts his bag on his bed. "Because I didn't know if you remember being involved with me. Or if you'd want to be in with me even if you did remember."

Bucky turns around and stares at him.

"Just like that, huh?" he says. 

"Yeah," Steve answers. "Before it turned time back, I was with it for a long time. And before that they shot you in the head in front of me. So excuse me if I'm tired of beating around the bush. Goodnight, Buck."

This Steve doesn't smile. Oh, Goddamn it, this Steve? It's _his_ Steve, it _is_ Steve.

Steve doesn't smile. Steve is old, old on the inside, new on the outside. It's a nightmare of a different sort, but they've had so many between them. 

He's gone before Bucky can call him back, which is just as well. Because he's got no idea what to say.

***

They move like this - place to place, with Steve as their guiding light, even though he seems so dark these days. They have safehouses and codes, and really it's no different than what Bucky was already doing. Except Wilson and Romanov are on the other end of a communication link. And, of course, he's not alone.

“How long?” Bucky asks one night, and Steve shakes his head where he’s lying on the camp bed. 

“It doesn’t matter.”

“How _long?_ ” Bucky asks again, and Steve sighs hard through his nose.

“I talked to it for maybe five minutes, time kept repeating or something,” he answers, but it’s evasive - a specific answer to avoid a specific question.

“Steve,” Bucky says, because he’s been manipulated, he’s been lied to, he’s been told half-truths and been evaded and he’s had enough. “How long?”

And there’s silence, which stretches. 

“About sixteen hundred years,” Steve answers eventually.

Bucky grits his teeth. He’s spoken to the people Wilson put him in touch with, he knows there’s no comparison when every experience is different, when every person is different.

“Right,” he says.

There isn’t much else he can say to any of it really.

Steve sleeps as he always did - lightly and as silently as his health allows. These days, Bucky barely hears him breathe when he listens out for him.

He remembers loving Steve.

He still loves Steve.

But after everything he's done, and all that he's been through, he doesn't know quite what to do with it any more.

***

When Steve said home, Steve meant ‘with me.’ There’s no building, not specifically, just the two of them, and it’s…

Bucky wishes it weren’t so easy to settle into, because the first thing the enemy takes from you when they find you is _everything you love._ And he does love Steve, though he knows what a foolish thing that is. Still, nobody looks at them like this, not unless Steve is being Steve. All Steve has to do is drop his shoulders back a little, straighten his spine, lift his head, and crowds part for them, heads turn away from them.

Bucky’s certain, every day, that someone will come for them eventually. Steve tells him there was a storm coming once, but it left them behind, it took a different turn. When Bucky asks what he means he says, 

“You know you hear people say sometimes, ‘in a different life,’ something would be different? In another life I’d’ve died of a heart-attack at twenty-five, in another life the serum would have killed me-”

“Don’t,” Bucky says. “Don’t say shit like this-”

“In some other existence,” Steve says, “there was a storm coming. They would have taken you from me again and again and again.”

Bucky looks at him, finds that he can. He can’t, always, and it hurts Steve, he knows that.

“And what happened to the storm?” he says.

Steve doesn’t blink.

“You don’t need to worry about it,” he says. “You don’t need to worry about anything, not any more.”

Steve says things like that sometimes. Sometimes Bucky thinks he might want to know what it could have been. 

“People want me dead,” Bucky says to him one afternoon.

“And I want you alive,” Steve answers, gentle, simple. _“Who do you think will win?”_

Bucky tries to be afraid of him, knows he should be. 

But somehow he just can’t bring himself to do it.

***

Recovery will never be over, he knows that. Or, at least, he learns it.

He learns it screaming in the middle of the night, or stepping back from certain things with shaking hands, or on days where he cannot, _cannot_ rouse himself.

Steve does not push him to anything, except when he needs it. It sounds strange, but Steve seems to know when he can’t stand to try, and knows when trying might manage to push him through whatever funk he’s in. It’s infuriating in a way, Steve doesn’t do the kinds of things he used to when they were young. He hides in the shadows (or, Jesus, in plain sight, sure, why not,) and doesn’t start arguments, and doesn’t push Bucky when he doesn’t want to be pushed. 

They’re both of them old, he supposes. Steve’s older now, of course.

“Seventy years ain’t nothin’ on sixteen hu-”

And Steve grabs him. He does it rarely, because it’s not a good idea to grab Bucky without warning, but he hasn’t done this for years - he takes Bucky by the shoulders, and shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “Don’t. They’re different. Don’t do that, Bucky, you can’t-” he clenches his jaw, breathes out hard through his nose. “Don’t do that to yourself, Buck, it’s different. It’s _too_ different, all that matters is you’re here. You’re alive. You’re alright.”

Sometimes he’s the Steve Bucky’s always known.

And Bucky loves him, more than anything in the world he loves Steve, but it’s months. It’s _months_ before he can reconcile the Steve he knows with the Steve who doesn’t smile and talks like an old tome and turns hard-to-look-at-directly when he’s angry. 

They’re sitting quietly - Steve’s reading, Bucky’s reading, the wireless - the radio - is on in the background.

Steve doesn’t smile. He doesn’t blink. There are days he passes through the world like a haze but, today, he’s small and quiet and just himself and Bucky finds, when he glances over, that Steve is staring at him. It’s been almost half a year since Steve walked him out of his apartment. Bucky doesn’t often catch him staring, though he knows Steve does it a lot. This time, though, what’s looking at him is Steve, not whatever Steve sometimes makes himself into.

Steve looks away immediately.

Bucky waits. 

Sure enough after perhaps a minute, a minute and a half, Steve glances at him, and Bucky can see him double-take as he goes to look and then realizes Bucky’s looking back at him - at which point he ducks his head.

“What,” Bucky says, and Steve rolls one shoulder in a shrug.

“I,” he says. “Are you happy?” And then he looks at Bucky. 

Bucky wishes Steve were doing the thing he does, wishes there were an excuse not to look at him, but it’s just Steve. It’s just Steve’s eyes, just Steve’s skin. Just Steve. Steve who always managed to look that small, regardless of how big he was.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I think happy might be a little outta my reach.”

Steve’s mouth opens, he looks down, away, he shrinks, and Bucky -oh God,wait -suddenly realizes what he’s asking.

“With you?” he says, and that’s a worse tone of voice, God, could he sound more incredulous? Steve looks like he’s going to try and turn himself inside-out, but Bucky persists. “You mean with you. Am I happy with you - Steve…”

Steve swallows so hard that Bucky can hear it and he comes to it then, he looks at the guy he’s been friends with since they were skinning knees and tussling in alleyways, since the world lived in tones of sepia and the future was a dream they never thought they’d see.

Bucky gets up. It’s hard to touch sometimes, hard to be cooped up, hard to go outside, life is hard. Life is hard a lot of the time, but Steve, in the armchair that’s not big enough for him, in the apartment that hides them, Steve’s got the serum and too many years and the remnants of a creature nobody can understand inside of him. And Bucky loves him anyway.

“Steve,” he says, and he goes to Steve, “happy might be a little outta my reach but there ain’t nowhere else I’d wanna be than with you.”

Steve shakes his head, looks like he’s laughing, but he’s not. He’s not.

“I can’t stop it,” he whispers, and he smiles but it’s not in his eyes. His voice is just his own, his skin flushed red at the tip of his nose, and his eyes shine when he won’t look directly at Bucky. This time apparently it’s Bucky who’s hard to look at. “I can’t let it go, it won’t leave. And I thought…I think maybe it’s not…it’s not something living in me. It’s not something separate. It’s just-” he laughs, wet and thick, voice shaking “-part of me. A part of me I can’t control.”

Bucky reaches out to him then, the way he hasn’t before, because he knows. The two of them, they’ve always been this way - hiding something dark because there’s no better way to live with it, holding the pain close so that the other can’t see. 

“You’re a goddamn fool,” Bucky tells him, and Steve laughs again, a rasp, a cough as he hunches his shoulders, as he folds himself up against Bucky’s stomach, curled forward in his chair while Bucky bends over him to gather him close.

They both are, of course, fools. Bucky for thinking Steve could ever stop loving him, Steve for thinking he could ever change so irreparably as to be impossible for Bucky to love.

***

After that, it’s easier. Bucky practices looking at him when he can’t look at him. He pays special attention when Steve seems hazy.

They spend time together, of course, but Steve doesn’t seem quite so _un-Steve_ quite so often as he did before. He doesn’t seem quite so distant either, quite so _old_ , and Bucky wonders if it wasn’t a conscious thing. He wonders if it’s less that whatever was left in Steve came out, and more that Steve was retreating behind it. 

It would make sense that that’s happening less now they’ve had their heart-to-hearts. A lot of them. 

Bucky has his bad days - of course he does. He has them _often_ , but it isn’t so strange to sleep in the same room as Steve (who sometimes sleeps in the other bed with his eyes half-open), or to share a room with Steve (who sometimes speaks in a voice that Bucky can hear too much), or to spend days working his way out of his bedroom to the living room (where Steve is standing in the middle of the room staring at nothing at all). 

Steve puts up with everything.

“It’s not a hardship, Buck,” he says softly, just as often as Bucky worries. 

Bucky’s not sure he’s managed to convince Steve that the same is true for him too, but they’ve got time.

It’s almost a year from when Steve walked him out of his apartment in Romania that he begins to feel the other things coming back to him. 

He gets hungry instead of just knowing he should eat, for things he _likes_ instead of just things he’s not averse to. He starts to prefer books and films he’s read and seen instead of just ticking things off a list. He starts to _want._

And he’s loved Steve since before he knew what love was. Once he started to want, desire was always going to be hot on its heels.

***

Desire glows low and hot before it burns bright and blinding. He finds it creeping up like molasses and seeping out across his skin.

Steve sits by the window and reads and Bucky’s arrested by his profile and the texture of his skin. Steve cooks for him in the kitchen and Bucky imagines the strength in his arms. Steve brings him coffee and Bucky takes the mug from him with a brush of fingers whose warmth suffuses through him. 

How might, he thinks, that skin feel pressed to his, those arms feel around him, those fingers feel against his cheek brushed just as lightly?

He loves Steve now and remembers loving him then, but his body begins to remember too, and then, well. Then every day is harder than the last.

Bucky’s not ready for that. He wants to be, he _wants so badly_ to be ready for it, but the thought of Steve brushing soft lips over his, the thought of Steve’s breath warm on his neck, the thought of Steve’s body over his-

His mind paints pictures for him vividly enough that he sometimes dreams about it, but it’s never right when he dreams it, and he can’t handle the reality of it. He finds himself thinking about it, when Steve is breathing softly in the bed next to him at night, about how Steve’s hands might feel on him, but it’s…

It’s too much for him. For now. 

Steve, he thinks, knows. Steve gives him subtle smiles and raised eyebrows when Bucky’s mouth turns dry, stands closer on days when Bucky’s shoulders aren’t so tense. 

Of course Steve knows, Steve knows Bucky better than Bucky knows himself at this point. 

Steve doesn’t push him. _Still_ doesn’t push him - just lets Bucky share his space and watches with a warmth in his eyes Bucky still isn’t able to believe he deserves.

But, of course, Steve can’t help what he doesn’t know. 

He can’t help the way he wets his lips when (he thinks) Bucky isn’t looking at him. He can’t help the way goosebumps rise on his skin when Bucky sits closer to him than usual. He can’t help the things he says when he’s asleep. And if it were everything, if he talked in his sleep the way he used to gasp and murmur in their apartment, Bucky would find it easy to be put off - it’d be too much. It’d be out of Bucky’s ability to imagine. 

If Steve slurred, ‘wanna fuck you’ or ‘feel so good in me’ or ‘just like that’ in the middle of the night, Bucky would be a little afraid of it. But he doesn’t. 

He breathes Bucky’s name like a prayer, deep in his chest as his breathing shudders. 

And that sound, that’s a sound Bucky can’t help but hear and think of closeness, of warmth and weight and dust he can smell, sunlight he can feel. He knows Steve wants him too, he’s known it since Steve spoke so plainly to him, but the way he groans Bucky’s name, barely loud enough to hear, in the middle of the night? It’s a confirmation, a memory, and a promise all at once.

Bucky will love him right one day, he decides. He hears Steve’s voice in his memory saying _any way - or not at all - is right, if that’s what you want,_ but fuck that. Bucky loves him with heart and soul, one day his body will follow, and he’ll ignore the ache in his bones for as long as it takes for the reluctance in his hands to fade.

***

It’s almost eighteen months when Bucky first sees it. He thinks he’s having a nightmare and goes back to sleep because that’s the best way to get rid of one dream if it won’t leave. Roll over and start another.

He talks to Steve about it the day after.

“Something was. In the bed with you?” he says, and Steve yawns as he lifts his coffee to his mouth.

“Ooh, something?” he says. “Was it good-lookin’?” 

Bucky smiles a little but shakes his head, feels his mind slide backwards.

“Nah,” he says. “Just shadows.”

He doesn’t tell Steve what the shadows were doing. He’s not ready for Steve to get the wrong idea.

***

Steve's not worried, per se, just thoughtful. And his face is given to displays of semi-anxiety, always was. A face so sweet, so carefully sculpted, but prone to concern. It's because he feels, of course, because he cares and because this world is newer to him than it is to Bucky. It's strange - Steve's spent more time in it, but Bucky's more accustomed. Bucky can deal with the world around him but Steve, so it has always really seemed, is only able to stomach the world around him if Bucky's by his side.

It's a terrible thing to think, given how long Steve managed without him but then, Steve says, he never really managed at all.

But now, Steve's seemingly anxious expression is merely interest. Eyebrows turned upward in the center, he turns his head to look past Bucky, almost through him, hand up and tucking the edge of the hood of his sweatshirt against his lips like a coy young thing from the old stories they used to share. Big blue eyes scan the world on the other side of Bucky, pale skin and knuckles pressed tight to his moue of his mouth like a kiss. He looks like something out of a painting, Bucky thinks, a work of art meant only for the two of them. Some hidden work a lost treasure - a girl hiding her face from a lover's gaze with a veil of chiffon, perhaps, or a man whose countenance must be kept from view by the collar of his coat from his pursuers. 

"You make me into someone I don't know," he says softly, and Steve's gaze moves, smooth as ever without saccades, to meet his own.

"Mmmdo I?" he says, speaking first into his knuckles and then soft into the air between them.

"You make me someone I don’t recognize," Bucky tells him. "I can't remember the last time I thought the world looked beautiful when you weren't with me."

"You think I make the world beautiful?" Steve says. 

"You make little things important," Bucky tells him, lost, enraptured. "The smallest things, and I can't think of anything else. You clear your throat or you close your eyes, or you hold your seams up to your face and there you are, a work of art."

"I love you," Steve says, and he says it simply, with no pretense, not in answer but a separate thing. "I love you."

Bucky nods slowly and reaches out to him, curls his fingers around Steve's and presses Steve’s knuckles to Steve’s lips, the hem of the hoodie still held between Steve’s fingers. A kiss Bucky can't give, one he can't take. But a kiss he’d give if he could.

And that's a start.

***

Steve moans Bucky's name at night, and Bucky listens because he waits to hear it. Steve can't pretend when he's not awake, can't be falsely affectionate or lie about his feelings. He moans Bucky's name at night and Bucky listens because he waits to hear it, because it's proof. Steve loves him. Steve wants him. Even after so, so long.

***

One afternoon, Bucky tries. Bucky pushes _himself_ and finds that it's not as hard as it used to be. It's not as nerve-wracking as it was. They're reading, Bucky in his chair, Steve on the couch, and so Bucky moves from his seat to sit with Steve. He puts himself on the couch and doesn't look at Steve - he can't stand to see the hope, or the disappointment, whichever. If he doesn't look, he doesn't have to think about it, he can just do what he's doing and that will be the point he starts from.

So he turns his back to Steve and slumps against him, spine the length of Steve's arm, feet planted against the edge of the couch.

Steve says nothing. Does nothing. Doesn't hold his breath - all Bucky hears is the shift of his hair over fabric as he turns his head, and the same sound as he turns it back. He can't always hear Steve's heart these days, but now it even thunders hard enough that Bucky's ears, enhanced as they are, can't miss it.

***

After a week, he holds Steve's hand, and Steve laces their fingers and says not a word.

***

The nightmares persist, so he thinks, and it saddens him for a time. He's doing so well in other places - Steve's touches turn affectionate without lust, are loving without the expectation of anything but love. He brushes hair out of Bucky's eyes, slips a hand down his spine to the small of his back when they pass in their narrow corridor, presses a kiss - _a kiss_ \- to Bucky's fingers when he joins their hands.

"I think," Bucky tells him one night, as they go about their nightly routine, and Steve turns to look at him.

Now he holds his breath, Bucky can hear the lack of it. He knows this will be important - it feels huge in Bucky's chest.

"I'd like," he says, "for you to…" he's not sure what to say. He's not sure how to convey what he wants without accidentally opening himself up to a world of things he cannot take, but Steve's always been careful, hasn't he? Steve is always cautious with him. "For you to kiss me goodnight."

Steve breathes then, hard and sudden, his mouth dropping open. There is the hope that Bucky didn't want to see, because it's a hope that he'll dash, a hope Steve will have ruined.

"Are you sure?" he says, soft, deep, one hand up and out toward him, as though to fend him off, or hold him close.

And Bucky isn't sure he can, but is sure that he wants to.

"Yeah," he says. 

Steve looks flummoxed, shoulders sagging, that same concern in his features. He takes one step, a second, and lifts his hands slowly so that there's time to stop, time for Bucky to move. Another step and he turns his head, ducks his head to bring them together, and his hands-

His hands are warm at the base of Bucky's skull, fingers gentle in his hair, so careful as they cradle him but without any chance that he could slip. His breath is warm on Bucky's lips before the kiss, his skin still smells the way it always has, his long lashes sweep down like every time before them. And then soft, dry skin, Steve's lips press to his, Steve kisses him.

Bucky need never have worried. It is a press of lips and nothing more, chaste and sweet, but his heart races, his breath won't come easy. His eyes sting, and he brings his hands up to Steve's wrists, holds his hands where they are before Steve can pull away, and steals another, a second kiss. It lasts longer, though it's just the same press of lips, and Bucky wants to open his mouth and pull Steve down, to give his body over and breathe each others' breath. That, he _cannot_ do but, for the first time, it might not stop him, and _that_ would be disastrous, _that_ would dash Steve's hopes. 

He moves to pull away and, instantly, Steve allows it. 

Steve, breathless with wonder at Bucky's meager progress, Steve, whose heart races just like Bucky's, whose eyes glow with love and love alone this time. 

"Thank you," he says, soft, and, though he removed his hands slowly, Bucky's skin is cold without them. 

He nods a little, can't think enough to answer. His lips tingle, his lungs feel too small, his skin is alive and singing, crying out. Steve stands still, actually anxious this time, and Bucky can't smile, he's feeling too much to smile. But he did want it, he wants the second kiss, it felt glorious, glorious. 

Steve doesn't dare speak, and Bucky finds his voice returning because he needs Steve to hear it.

"I do want you," he blurts. "I…” And then reality kicks in. “I don't know how long it might be but I will- One day I'll, I'll…"

Steve touches the tip of his tongue to his lower lip as he nods, and Bucky watches the pink on his cheekbones. 

"If ever you're ready," Steve says, "then whenever you're ready."

And it feels like the truth.

***

It happens three more times before he realizes it’s not a recurring nightmare. It would be a strange subject for a nightmare, of course, but it doesn’t seem at first like it could be anything except one. He’s had nightmares about losing Steve again - of course he has. He dreams a multitude of terrifying things. Bucky shooting him in the head on the causeway, Steve lying lifeless and glassy-eyed in the bed in their apartment in Brooklyn, Steve turning to blue confetti in the face of Hydra’s weapons, Steve beaten to death in a back alley, Steve in a car accident, Steve under a collapsing bridge, Steve dead, Steve dead, Steve dead.

And so he doesn’t doubt, the second time he surfaces blearily to find shadows crisscrossing the bed like living things, that there’s a rational explanation and that rational explanation is “it’s a dream,” but then it happens a third time, and Bucky can’t help but watch.

Hey, if he’s dreaming, right?

Steve’s not at all concerned. He’s not upset or distressed - the sounds he makes do not indicate unhappiness. Instead, he makes gentle sounds in the back of his throat as shadows steal across his skin, his body lifts and moves in increments as though something pushes at him from underneath and, just as he starts to make needy little noises, the scratchiness in Bucky’s eyes clears, the muted world around him sharpens, his perception going from ‘Steve’ to their bedroom and the bed in which Steve is currently lying, and the very definitely not-being-dreamed things that are all over him like maggots-

“STEVE!” he yells, sitting upright in bed, pushing back the covers to haul himself out and onto his feet and-

Steve…Steve’s wide-eyed and gasping, chest heaving, clutching at the mattress with both hands and halfway to sitting up himself. This is where they find themselves when they both freeze. 

“Buck?” Steve rasps.

Yanked ass-backward out of sleep instead of waking slowly, and faced with a lot of worked-up supersoldier looking over him, Steve looks sort of between terrified and whatever it is that his body’s doing in self-defense. There’s no more blackness, no shadows, just Steve, but it’s a Steve whose skin is. Weird. Eyes weird too, it’s, yeah that’s-

“Sorry,” Bucky breathes. “I’m sorry but you,” he gestures to the bed, where there’s nothing to prove what he just saw. “Steve, you were…”

Steve pushes the covers down a little - he wears pajamas even though Bucky knows he prefers to sleep naked, because he doesn’t want Bucky to catch a glimpse of anything Bucky’s not ready for. And Bucky’s heart sinks because he’s not stupid. He’s not an idiot. He saw what he saw, but who’d believe a guy with so many holes in his brain you can feel a breeze when you ask what he’s thinking?

“Sorry,” he says, because it’s way better to do this himself than here Steve not-believe. “I was having a nightmare.”

Steve begins to be more human, and less whatever the other part of him is.

“Buck,” he says, soft, apologetic, like _aw, sweetheart,_ but Bucky turns away from him. Until Steve speaks. “What did you see?”

Because that tone is different. That tone is cautious. 

This is worry not _for_ Bucky, but _because_ of him.

Bucky turns his head just a little.

“Steve,” he says, “what were you dreaming about?” 

Steve says nothing for a long few moments, and Bucky can’t stand the silence - in the darkness, it’s almost like neither of them are real, and he wants so badly for this to be real, even if they have their problems, even if things aren’t always easy. He turns back to look at him and Steve is wide-eyed and stock-still. Bucky didn’t think it was possible for him to look small any more, but there he is. Despite his size, despite his presence. He looks small.

“Just you,” he says softly. 

Bucky isn’t sure what to make of him, isn’t sure how to take what he’s just been told. 

“Just me?” he says.

Steve nods, looking halfway between hopeful and devastated. 

“I promise,” he says. “What did you see?” 

And Bucky figures one of them has to bite the bullet. If they pussyfoot around it all night, they’ll never get anywhere and it’ll only lead to frustration. Half strange-creature or not, Steve was always that way. Bucky was the first one to kiss him - he remembers that. Steve, afraid and stoic and totally convinced that nobody could ever want him, let alone Bucky.

“There were,” Bucky says, but he shakes his head. “I don’t know what they were. But they were all over you. Like….vines. Maybe? Shadows.”

Steve looks ill, his mouth opening just a little as his expression falls. Years stretch out between them, decades, centuries, and a voice he used to know says _how? How can a fella like you love a guy like me?_

“What is it?” Bucky says, and Steve seems to startle at the question, as though he hadn’t expected Bucky to stay. 

“I don’t know,” Steve says. 

“When you were dreaming of me,” Bucky says, “what were you dreaming?”

Bucky’s eyes might not be as good as Steve’s, but he’s had some version of the serum, and he can see both the flush over Steve’s skin and the shame in his eyes before he drops Bucky’s gaze.

So that’s what it was. 

“Pal, please tell me you ain’t still carryin’ that Catholic bullshit around with you.”

Steve looks up, brow furrowed, ready to object, and Bucky shakes his head.

“You can’t help what you dream about,” he says. “Nor should you. Gonna tell me otherwise?”

Steve just stares at him. 

“What did you dream we were doing?” Bucky asks, and Steve looks aside for a moment before he shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” he says. “We were….together. And it’s like…”

“I was touching you,” Bucky says.

“Everywhere,” Steve answers, and he shakes his head. “Everywhere.”

Bucky nods slowly. 

“Okay,” he says. “It’s okay.”

And Bucky makes a decision. It’s hardly even something he needs to think about, despite what he saw, despite what he knows. 

He gets back into bed next to Steve and pulls the covers up over them both. Steve still sits in the bed, and so looks down at him where he lies. Bucky just watches him, and waits. 

Eventually, Steve seems to realize that Bucky means it, that Bucky isn’t leaving and, slowly, he settles down besides Bucky. It takes a long time for them to sleep, mostly because Bucky find it difficult to sleep when someone is watching him, and Steve stares as though he expects Bucky to evaporate into thin air as soon as he closes his eyes. 

It’s at breakfast the next morning that Bucky realizes something - none of those things that were all over Steve, those things that Steve somehow made because he was dreaming about Bucky, because he was dreaming of the two of them together, despite his being asleep, none of them came anywhere near him.

***

The next time Bucky sees it happen, he comes awake slowly, still unsure. Though he knows what must be happening, he still can’t quite understand it for a long few minutes. It’s like coming round from sedation, being pulled up out of a darkness he can’t quite shed, one that clings to him like molasses and takes a while to sink back away from him. For those long few minutes, he knows that all he would have to do would be to close his eyes, and he would sink back down, and it would be morning, and all of this might as well never have happened.

He tries hard to keep himself awake.

Just like before, Steve is asleep, though his body moves in different places, a little at a time. As Bucky’s eyes open properly an the unconsciousness falls away, he begins to see them, whatever they are. They sweep around him in wisps and curls, as though the bed Steve lies in is made of smoke, but they curl over his limbs like tendrils of vines, and flit so quickly that - even though Bucky knows they’re there - he still has trouble seeing them. It’s almost as if they don’t want to be seen - or, perhaps more accurately, he can’t quite perceive them. He gets the same feeling from it as he does when Steve stops being _Steve_ exactly, and he lies there quietly, watching. 

Steve makes soft sighs and gentle murmurs, but his eyes stay closed, his long lashes resting against his cheeks. He is flushed, he is aroused, but the swirling tendrils that flow over his skin do so silently, and without reaching out for Bucky.

Bucky watches. 

He doesn’t know how long he watches for, how long he lies there in the dark and waits, following the winding shapes with his eyes. It could be minutes, perhaps he lies there an hour, but there comes a time when watching isn’t enough.

He wonders if they feel like smoke, or if they feel like vines and, as he wonders, the twisting, vaporous mass forms a tendril that curls upward, that was not there before. For a moment, Bucky’s anxious - what if it touches him? What if it reaches out and won’t let him go? 

Almost as soon as he has the thought, the tendril whispers away into nothing.

Bucky’s relief is tinged with curiosity. He’s glad it left him alone, but…

The tendril curls upward again, and stays near to Steve. It doesn’t move like the others, it simply stays where it is. This time, Bucky thwarts himself - can it tell what he wants? Thinking too hard about it turns into overthinking it, and then he can’t tell what he wants. 

Except that once he thinks he isn’t sure, he knows that he is. 

He wants to know.

The tendril does not move, except for the strange shifting of its mass. It stays where it is, near to Steve. But Bucky _does_ want to know what it feels like, even if he is afraid of it doing too much, of it deciding his being curious is permission to do whatever it wants.

But they all belong to Steve, don’t they? And so far it has known, somehow, just what he wanted from it. 

Cautiously, he holds out his hand to it, just to see what it feels like and, almost as though it’s unintentional, the tendril collapses on itself and dissipates against his hand.

It feels like the brush of the backs of Steve’s fingers when he brushes Bucky’s hair out of his eyes, or like the tip of his nose when they embrace and Steve turns his face toward Bucky’s. It feels warm, and dry, and it felt solid until it disappeared. It felt human.

Bucky holds out his hand, to see if it can hold his hand back, and a thicker tendril appears and curls towards him, strokes out across his palm and retreats, but doesn’t dissipate. Bucky keeps his hand where it is, just to see what happens, and it comes back. It curls towards him again, strokes out across his palm and, this time, he curls his fingers about it in return.

Steve draws a large breath through his nose, and moans softly in the back of his throat, and Bucky flinches back. So too does the tendril, coiling backward like Bucky’s touch burned it and, for a moment, he worries that it did.

But…it didn’t move back until Bucky did, and Bucky didn’t flinch until Steve reacted. He can’t tell if he hurt it - can’t tell if it hurt Steve. It certainly didn’t hurt Bucky. 

He stretches his hand out again, and waits. Slowly, the curling tendril begins to move toward him as well, cautiously as though it’s no longer sure of him but, as soon as Bucky thinks of it as a nervous animal, thinks of encouraging a stray kitten, or feeding a fawn in the forest, it eases forward again, coming closer like a wisp of smoke toward his outstretched hand.

When it touches him, he keeps his hand still, and it curls around his fingers. It’s strange. The only thing he can equate it to is things he already knows. It feels like fingers, like a hand, dry and smooth like perhaps holding a snake or a warm, dry tongue. 

Muscle. It feels like muscle, and Bucky turns his hand and watches it moving between his fingers, watches it edge forward and backward as though it’s searching him. He isn’t afraid of it. He’s not sure what to make of it, but fear doesn’t occur to him this time - it’s as though, now he can see it, and interact with it, he feels no threat from it at all.

It’s dangerous to be so easy about it - if it _is_ something to be worried about-

But it pulls back, again, as though it knows what he’s thinking. 

“How do you know?” he murmurs, and then there’s a pause - Bucky can feel it, the air heavy with waiting, with holding back. 

And when he looks at Steve’s face, Steve’s eyes are open.

He doesn’t say anything, not sure that Steve’s fully awake, lying still. He thinks maybe Steve’s caught the same way he was himself, halfway between asleep and waking, until Steve’s gaze, dark and glittering, moves without saccades to look at the place where the smoke winds around his hand.

“You can feel that?” Bucky says, because it’s the first thing he thinks of to say.

Steve nods minutely, still silent.

Bucky hesitates. What he wants and what he feels he can do are two very different things, and he doesn’t want to push himself too far with anything, let alone something Steve is so worried will make Bucky upset. 

But he realizes, and it dawns on him slowly, little by little like a real sunrise would, that there is no reason not to explain this to Steve. There is nothing keeping him from saying what he thinks, nobody to punish him for speaking his mind, nobody who will cringe away from him if he voices his thoughts.

“I want to do more,” Bucky tells him softly. “But I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

There’s something in Steve’s eyes that it takes a moment for Bucky to discern, but he recognizes it for apprehension not long after. Steve looks worried, not just by Bucky and the things interacting, but by the things themselves.

“Have you ever seen these?” Bucky asks and, slowly, Steve shakes his head.

“Not…” he says.

Not outside of his dreams. He probably didn’t even know they could be controlled while he was awake.

“You makin’ ‘em do this?” Bucky asks, and Steve swallows hard. 

“Kinda,” he breathes, and so Bucky turns his hand over and closes gentle fingers around the tendril.

Steve’s lashes flutter, his mouth opens just enough that Bucky notices. 

“Feels good?” he asks, and Steve wets his lips.

“Feels like…” he says, and it’s not so much arousal now as relief - the same relief he used to see in Steve when Bucky gave him a hug he’d been sorely needing, or when he’d curl up next to Steve on their creaky worn-thin mattress. “…like you,” he settles on. 

Bucky nods. It looks like nothing, like an absence of everything - blacker than black, as though the universe has paused for an inch or so.

“Is it alright?” Steve asks softly. “I won’t come any closer but the-” he nods at the tendril of black smoke Bucky holds. 

“It’s okay,” he says softly. “I’m not afraid.”

Steve nods, still seemingly unsure, and Bucky, emboldened, tugs it closer, just a little. 

Steve comes with it, his shoulders lifting, his whole body canting towards Bucky’s, but he stops himself. He doesn’t do it - doesn’t bring Bucky into his arms the way it looks as though he’d like to. 

“We can go back to sleep,” Bucky tells him. And then, because it feels right to do so, he says, “you can keep this one with me. If you want to.”

Steve’s mouth opens, surprise and more relief.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

And so they go to sleep - Steve in his shifting bed of void-like smoke, and Bucky with a soft, warm tendril held in his open palm.

***

Steve can’t yet just bring them out. He knows they’re there, so he says, but he doesn’t know how to make them be….here. From wherever they are.

Not yet.

“It’s like if,” he says, from where he’s sitting at the table, and then pauses. “I know how it’d feel to lift the coffee pot with ‘em. You know? O-Or to pick up the mail or try and get dressed. It’s like I have the memory already.”

Bucky nods, picking up the last mug to dry.

“Think if we surprise ‘em?” he says, and Steve laughs bemusedly.

“Like how?” he says.

“Think fast,” Bucky answers, and throws the mug he’s holding outward, way out of Steve’s way, towards the living room.

Where it smashes. 

There’s a moment of silence where neither of them can really believe that he’s just done what he did, and then Steve laughs. 

Steve laughs and it’s like day dawning on something that’s only been in shadow for half its life, like the warm, golden glow of a new morning, or the gentle warmth of the summer sun. Bucky finds himself laughing too.

“So no?” he says, and Steve laughs harder.

 _Here,_ Bucky thinks, however buried and however old, _here are the men we used to be._

***

It takes another six months. Bucky feels he hates himself enough for all of HYDRA. _Don’t give me a jury,_ he thinks to himself. _I’ll tell you right now what kinda guy I am,_ and Steve says terrible wonderful things about how Bucky doesn’t need to love himself for Steve to love him, about how it doesn’t matter if it never happens, he’ll wait forever.

It taking forever is what Bucky’s worried about. 

They start with embraces - small, half-holding, glancing-touches as they pass moving from place to place. Held hands are easy, leaning against each other on the couch, and then Steve puts his arm around Bucky and then Bucky comes closer. It takes six months for them to move through everything - from holding to kissing, from kissing to touching, from touching to being in the same room as each other with pretty intense activities going on, but it’s not until they’ve been intimate and enjoyed it, not until Bucky’s fucked Steve, and ridden Steve, not until they’re who they used to be that they even consider anything more. 

Being human comes back to Bucky more easily every day, and soon he’s pressing kisses to the back of Steve’s neck in the mornings when he checks his news feed, lingering touches when they hand each other coffee or press buttons on the treadmill. They become again the stupid lovestruck teenagers they used to be, and ignore the rest of the world. 

Steve still can’t bring them out when he wants them. He really does accidentally drop a plate one afternoon, and it shatters into three big pieces and a few little ones, with a very dissatisfying _clunk_ on the kitchen floor, but no tendrils materialize to save it at the last moment. 

“Nuts,” Steve says, and Bucky helps him pick up the pieces, and then kisses him for being a klutz.

Bucky doesn't always wake up when Steve has his dreams either, so they don't even know for certain that the smoky tendrils appear every time he dreams of Bucky, but he does dream of Bucky more often. 

“What are you seein' in there,” Bucky says to him one evening, “when you get your guys comin' up?”

Steve rubs the back of his neck and shakes his head, avoiding Bucky’s gaze.

“Mostly just you,” he says. “Sometimes you and me. But…mostly I can just see you.”

“See me?” Bucky asks, his hand against Steve’s chest because they’re squashed together on the couch. “Like see what you’re doing to me?”

Steve huffs a laugh.

“Or what you’re doing to me,” he says.

Until one day Bucky says, 

“I want to try touching them.”

And Steve sits down so they can talk about it. He doesn’t want them to touch him back, not to start with. He doesn’t want them to attack him or hold him down, but if they hold his hand, if Steve’s dreaming and they reach out for him because Steve wants to be connected to him, that’s fine. 

And so that’s what they do. Bucky waits for the next time he waits in the night, for the next time Steve dreams on a bed of smoke, and stretches out a hand to the flowing, undulating mass. A curling tendril reaches out and hesitates, and then curls around Bucky’s wrist like it often does, and so Bucky cradles it in his palm, a little coil of warm, black tendril, and follows the curve of it with the fingertips of his other hand. Steve, just like he did the last time Bucky tried this, shifts in his sleep with a gentle noise in the back of his throat, and his head turns minutely before he’s still again. 

He doesn’t say Bucky’s name, but Bucky feels as though - if they were both awake - Steve might have in that instant. 

~

They talk about it afterwards, of course. Steve wants to know what Bucky did, and Bucky, once he’s explained, wants to know why he’s asking.

“It felt different,” Steve tells him. “The you I was dreaming about, you felt…there.”

“There?” Bucky says. “There with you?”

Steve nods.

“I don’t know how to describe it,” he says. “But…Do you remember Father Donnelly used to talk about angels? And he said that sometimes those who’d passed might see you again?” 

Bucky bites back a smile - he remembers. And the way Steve said it was almost exactly in Father Donnelly’s cadence, too. 

“Do you remember I told you once I dreamed about my Ma?”

And Bucky doesn’t have to bite back a smile then. He doesn’t know what he believes for himself, but he knows the morning Steve, who’d tried so hard to be strong, wept into his hands for the loss of his mother as he told Bucky she’d come to tell him goodbye.

“I remember,” he says. 

“Like that,” Steve answers, and Bucky almost understands. 

Bucky remembers the morning in question, how Steve - fragile and too young and so tired and grieving - had sat up in bed and been overwhelmed by what he’d dreamed so quickly that his tears soaked dark circles into the bedsheets at his waist. _I dreamed of her before,_ he’d said, desperate and mourning, _but it was really her this time._

The closest thing Bucky has, so he thinks, is the difference between those people who held him, and Steve. If Pierce and Rumlow were contextless figures in contextless scenery, Steve was the Technicolor center of Bucky’s reality, even before he’d remembered what to call him. Steve blazed across Bucky’s world and seared away the people who’d burned James Barnes from his mind. Bucky understands. 

“You dreamed of me before,” he says, and Steve nods.

“But this time it was really you.”

~

There comes a time, and they knew there would, when Bucky believes he can want for something more. When he wakes in the night and wonders how the smoke would feel beneath his back, when he and Steve move together in pleasure and he wonders what they might feel like if they held him too, when they eat at table together and Bucky wonders how deep they run.

And so the next time, the next time something indiscernible wakes him, he holds out his hand, and waits for the tendril to curl around his wrist, around his forearm, before he lifts his hand in front of him and presses a kiss to the warm, dry smoothness. 

As always, it affects Steve. He moves a little, he makes his murmurs, and so Bucky considers that it might not be so terrible if another tendril held him safe, like they do for Steve. Almost as soon as he thinks it, another one curls toward him. It is thicker than the last, and moves more slowly, but Bucky lies still and waits as it crosses the bed toward him. When it reaches him, it too moves toward his wrist, not to coil around it but to be near the other, and Bucky suddenly knows without a shadow of a doubt what it wants. 

Carefully, he lifts his hand again, and presses a kiss to the newest tendril. 

“Hmm,” Steve says softly, and his brow must have furrowed because it smooths out as Bucky watches. 

Bucky waits for it to take its place, and it does, careully withdrawing until it is near to his waist, at which point it crosses over him. Bucky forces himself to be calm about it - embrace, not restraint - and the limb settles against him with a whisper of sensation, a gentle vibration against his skin as though it too were humming softly in relief.

~

“You should wake me up the next time,” Steve says, and Bucky is halfway through a slice of toast so he can’t answer immediately.

He nods instead.

“If you think that’ll work,” he says as he swallows his mouthful. “Sure. Maybe you can figure out how to talk to ‘em.”

But Bucky isn’t really concerned. He’s pretty sure they already know.

***

Waking Steve is not as simple as it might seem. Memories of Brooklyn keep his voice soft and his touches gentle, and he knows it’s stupid. If he wants Steve to wake up, he should speak to him, not whisper. But this is a man who used to be a boy whose pain kept him up all night, whose hunger made his stomach ache, and whose back ached regardless. This man Bucky loves was a boy Bucky was terrified for, and it’s not easy now to override the little voice that tells him to _let Steve sleep._ But here they are, together, and here is the smoke around him.

For all Bucky knows, it’s a constant companion in his sleep, but Steve is never asleep before Bucky, and he’s almost always awake first, too.

“Steve,” Bucky says again, because he wasn’t loud enough the first time and, quite through instinct, he touches one of the tendrils as he does. 

Steve comes awake as he almost always does these days - silently and instantly - his eyes already on Bucky before they’re open.

“You start sleeping with your eyes open and I’m leaving you,” he says. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, dear,” Steve says, a slow smile spreading across his face, widening as he takes in his surroundings.

He notices the tendrils a moment later - Bucky feels warm in his chest that Steve noticed him before the tendrils - and smiles. 

“They’re here, huh?” he says, because it would seem that, while he can’t yet call them up, he _can_ control them if they’re with him when he wakes. 

“Yeah,” Bucky says. 

“And you woke me up.”

Bucky nods, smiling a little cautiously but smiling all the same. 

“How you doin’ with ‘em?” Steve says, and Bucky raises his arm to show Steve the tendril curled around it, shows Steve his waist so that Steve can see it holds him there. “Is it meant to be doing that?” 

“Sure,” Bucky says softly, lifting that same arm so he can bring his hand to Steve’s cheek, to brush the back of his fingers along Steve’s cheekbone. “Kiss me.”

Steve does, a slow smile curving his mouth as he leans forward to bridge the gap between them. He doesn’t touch Bucky otherwise, but the kiss is slow, and warm, and deep and, when Bucky pulls back, some of the tendrils still shift under Steve but some, some are pressed to Steve’s body from behind, curling around his from as though they’re reaching out for Bucky. They’ve made love plenty since Bucky’s been able to do so, but never in the middle of the night. Never when it’s not just Steve.

“So you’re telling me you’re not doing this?” Bucky says, pointing at the tendril over his waist. 

It’s thicker now that Bucky isn’t new to it - more like a forearm than a rope or a vine. 

“I mean, I must be,” Steve says. “But not on purpose. At least, it wasn’t on purpose while I was asleep.”

Bucky nods, then he smiles, then he laughs.

“Yeah, you always were an octopus in your sleep,” he says, because it’s true. 

Whenever he shared a bed with Steve, Steve would move in his sleep to cover Bucky. Some people got cover-hogs for bed partners; Bucky Barnes got a human shield. 

“I love you very much,” Steve says quietly, his nose tip-to-tip with Bucky’s, and it’s just as well it’s dark because his voice is too raw for daytime, the emotion too strong to be revealed where it might be seen. 

Bucky puts his hands on Steve’s head, his fingers in Steve’s hair. 

“More than anything,” he agrees. “More than anything.”

When Steve kisses him again, Steve puts his hands in Bucky’s hair too, fingers easing backward through the strands as he strokes a hand down Bucky’s…spine? 

Bucky pulls back to look at him, and finds that Steve is not just reaching forward with his hands. Steve’s eyes open slowly but then his expression falls.

“Sorry!” he says in a rush of breath, and each of the black tendrils - there are a _lot_ of them - pull back. “I’m sorry!” 

“It’s alright,” Bucky says, because it is, and he squeezes the tendril that curls into his palm in apology - none of them were trapping him, none of them had wound around him. It was just Steve, one small extension of one hand. “It’s alright. I don’t mind.”

Steve settles into his pillows but still, that ever-present uneasiness remains. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, “sweetheart,” and then he lifts his arm and the coils of the tendrils and kisses the one that winds around his forearm. 

Steve’s brow furrows a little, his head moves forward minutely, and his gaze is fixed on Bucky’s mouth. Bucky does it again, just to see what happens, and Steve hunches forward a little more, as though he wants Bucky's mouth for himself. 

Bucky moves his arm out of the way and kisses Steve, and Steve kisses him back harder this time.

“Better?” Bucky says against his mouth. “Better baby?”

“Mh,” Steve says against his mouth, and Bucky feels little points of pressure down his neck and shoulder, feels the tendril around his forearm curl tighter.

“Watch yourselves,” Bucky says, and Steve pulls back again, but this time he’s gasping. “Are _you_ alright, Pal?”

Steve nods hesitantly, as though he can’t remember how to nod at first, and Bucky cups Steve’s cheek in his palm.

“What’s goin’ on in there, sweetheart?” he says, unsure, and Steve shuts his eyes tight and presses his lips together.

“Okay, we want-” he says, and Bucky feels his eyebrows rise just about to his hairline, _“-we w-want- Want you, Bucky,”_ and Bucky leans back a little to get a good look at him. 

“Honey, I hate to do this,” he says softly, “but I need you to show me you can stop.”

Steve lets out a rush of breath, and his expression turns reluctant, but he rolls back and takes the smoke with him - even Bucky’s arm-tendril leaves - and lies on his back looking at the ceiling.

His breathing is a little funny and the bedsheets are definitely a different shape over his hips, but other than that? He lies well away from Bucky, and so does everything else. Even the shifting of the smoke seems less. 

Actually, it seems less by the second - they’re retreating.

“Hey,” Bucky says, and Steve looks at him, his eyes big and worried.

Bucky pushes himself up and leans over Steve, and kisses him softly, runs a palm down Steve’s body from his chest to his cock. 

“Mh!” Steve says, clearly not expecting it, and Bucky pulls away harshly just because he can, grinning.

Even spliced with an eldritch god, Steve still loves him. And even though pieces of that part of him appear unbidden and surround him in his sleep, they still leave him be when Steve does. 

“Do you know how much I love you?” Bucky says. “Do you?”

And Steve’s mouth turns up a little at one corner. 

“More than anything?” he says. “Ask me how I know.”

Bucky snorts.

“You know ‘cause I told you,” he laughs.

“I know from experience,” Steve answers, and his tone is somber. “And you know it’s true.”

Bucky smiles down at him and nods. 

“I know,” he says. “So why don’t you show me what I’d get. If I let them- You-?”

 _“Us,”_ Steve says, his voice low and rough. He whines in the back of his throat and his eyes shine bright for a moment - it’s probably as much of a shock to him as it is to Bucky. _“Us, we- We love you- I-”_

“Alright, sugar,” Bucky murmurs, and he strokes Steve’s hair back from his forehead. “It’s alright. Why don’t you show me what I’d get if I let you, huh?”

 _“If you let me?”_ Steve asks, and Bucky strokes his head for a minute. 

“Ease up a second, sweetheart,” he says, soothing, trying to pull him back a little from the gathering otherness of him. “Gotta start somewhere don’t I?”

It makes sense, Bucky thinks, to ask for this first. It shouldn’t put Steve off too much. When they restarted their physical relationship, they just sat on the same bed and kept their hands to themselves (repeatedly) so there’s no reason that strategy can’t work again.

“Remember when we started?” Bucky says. “When I couldn’t let you touch me but I wanted to see, remember? We were lying on the bed together and I touched me and you touched you?” 

Steve breathes, nods a little.

“Yeah,” he says.

He thinks it’s just Steve talking, even if there’s more of him that exists now.

“Well maybe we can try it like that, sweethearts,” Bucky says. “Maybe you all can show me. And we can get to me some other time.”

Steve looks like he’s shivering, but he nods.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Yes.”

Bucky nods, too, kisses Steve’s forehead, Steve’s cheek, the corner of Steve’s mouth.

“Alright, sweetheart?” he murmurs, and Steve kisses back like he hasn’t kissed Bucky in this century a hundred times, like he hasn’t shared a bed with Bucky every night. 

They did this a few times when Bucky was first regaining his confidence, touched each other while they kissed because it was easier, and Steve moans softly now, his body shifting under Bucky’s. His mouth opens and Bucky runs his tongue along Steve’s lower lip just to feel the way he opens up to it. He gives himself over every time, always has, and Bucky’s grateful for it, that even now, after everything, Steve ‘s immediate response to him is to let Bucky take whatever he needs. Steve makes a different sound, then, a moan that’s lower in his chest, further back in his throat. It’s not so much the gentle sounds of comfort he often provides when they kiss as it is a hum of something deeper. 

Bucky pulls back to look at him and finds that Steve’s eyes stay closed, his head tilting back. His brow furrows just a little, and Bucky looks down the length of Steve’s body to find that the moving mass of black smoke is forming more tendrils, that those tendrils are hugging Steve’s body more closely than they did before.

“That’s right,” Bucky tells him, because it’s easier to watch him like this, easier to be fascinated by it than it is to participate, not as terrifying a prospect when Steve’s pretty mouth falls open on a groan. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s take a look at you.”

Steve nods, lets Bucky help him pull his pajama shirt up and off, and dives in for another kiss as soon as the fabric is free of his head. Bucky smiles, kissing him back, and he feels the awkward crunch as Steve makes his huge frame small, hunching inward to get his pants off his legs without breaking the kiss.

“Ohn,” he says a moment later and, when Bucky pulls back again, Steve sinks into the pillows and grabs at the bedclothes with both hands, presumably so as not to grab for Bucky. 

Bucky can’t see it for a moment or, more accurately, his brain skips over it for a second or two. Steve’s still surrounded by the smoke, but it curls up about him in more of the tendrils, little tongues of black flame that flicker up wherever there’s a gap. Bucky sees them climbing his skin everywhere he looks, his mind not quite seeing it all clearly, and Bucky wonders for a moment if they feel like tongues, if they’re satin whispers or heavy-handed touches. 

“What,” Steve says, but he has to pause to breathe a little, sweat glittering on his brow already. “What do you want them to do?” 

And Bucky scrapes his teeth over his lower lip. There’s a great deal he’d like to see, given that Steve’s controlling all of them. Can they cover his eyes and stroke him off the way Bucky can? Can they play with his nipples until he begs to come like he likes to do? Can they fuck him as good as Bucky can, hold him open for Bucky to see. 

“Whatever you want,” he says. “I don’t mind. You can have everything you feel like, can’t you?”

“Everything…” Steve murmurs, and Bucky doesn’t know if it’s a thought out loud or a question being asked.

Bucky runs his fingertips down the center of Steve’s chest again, throat to cock and back a time or two. Then he dips his hand below and cradles Steve’s balls in his palm, rolling them gently. One of Steve’s hands reaches out to grab at the forearm Bucky’s currently supporting his weight on, just aligning it so they’ve each got their hands near enough to each others’ elbows. It’s more than hand-holding, it’s stronger than that. It’s a sudden, instinctive desire to hold Bucky close in a way that means he can’t leave accidentally and Bucky is sure they’re both aware of the very good reason for that. 

But Bucky feels more, more than just Steve’s fingers, more than the weight of his palm and the press of his forearm. He looks down and finds that there are tendrils around their entwined arms, too. The smoke still shifts restlessly over Bucky’s skin, like it’s unsure of how warm its welcome will be, but Steve parts his legs for Bucky and stares up at him like he hung the moon.

“How’s that feel, sweetheart?” Bucky asks, and Steve nods minutely, expression hazy. 

Bucky spends a little while like that, just leaning over Steve, just touching him, and he wonders what the smoke will do, the tendrils, whether they’ll touch Steve slow, start quiet and wind him up, or whether they’ll-

“Bucky,” Steve says on a breath, his gaze losing focus, and his head turns a little toward his shoulder as he frowns. “Oh.”

Start slow, it seems - Bucky feels the warm touch of them rising between Steve’s legs, because he can feel them lapping at his own skin, too. The soft little points of them searching outward in curling little motions, like fast growing plants, as though they’re curious.

“Oh, that’s…” Steve says, and Bucky lets go of Steve’s balls in favor of watching the tendrils. 

They come up like molasses between his legs, stroking his inner thighs and the soft crease when thigh meets torso as though he’s sinking into liquid darkness, and they flow up over his balls. He gasps softly and tucks his chin down to look down the length of himself, but doesn’t lift his head, and Bucky just watches, mesmerized, as a long thick tendril like that one that holds his arm at night winds its way slowly, almost curiously, up from the swirling black mass that covers his balls to wind around Steve’s cock in a long, loose coil. Steve breathes as though the air-con is up to high, sucking a breath in quietly through his teeth as he tries to hold himself still, his back arching upward anyway.

When they first start to move, they tighten minutely, and then all the coils shift toward the head of Steve’s cock, like a fist made of one long rope. They slide back down just as slowly, pulling the skin of Steve’s cock taut as they go, pressing into the soft flesh at the base, and then they travel upward again. The head of Steve’s cock shines already, and his head goes back.

“Ah, ahn,” he murmurs, his eyes still half open, though nothing catches his gaze, and Bucky watches the coils shift up and back, up and back, slowly enough that it’s almost soothing to watch.

Steve lies, for all intents and purposes, in what looks like a bed of snakes, a pool of vines, and they begin to move, too, shifting the hair on his head as they wind across the back of his skull. _Of course,_ Bucky thinks, because he knows Steve loves to have fingers in his hair. The come up from the back of his neck, flicker at the tops of his shoulders and, between his torso and each arm, they crawl up his ribcage to reach his pectorals. Bucky’s not sure what they plan to do until they’ve done it, stretching out over Steve’s skin to find his nipples, to brush over them and tease until they’re pink and hard and Steve is moaning softly. 

He always did like having his nipples played with. 

Bucky watches one, how it flattens and sharpens, how it strikes every now and again in a way that makes Steve gasp each time - perhaps electricity, or something easy as a sharpened tip. It doesn’t matter - Steve lies quietly and sighs into the air as the tendrils pinch and play and curl around the little pink points, and flexes his fingers as more of the tendrils cross his body. One thick, black protrusion crosses Steve’s belly and widens as it does, not quite wide enough to be hand-shaped, and Steve hums softly, his expression almost pained. 

He breathes much more heavily now, his mouth open, wetting his lips every few seconds as he dries them out. He keeps a remarkably good handle on himself given that Bucky knows how sensitive he became after the serum. Everywhere he looks that isn’t the front of Steve’s body is being kissed by little black tendrils. 

“Oh,” Steve says, “oh,” and Bucky thinks he’s moving to begin with, but then Steve’s grip loosens on his arm, moves away entirely, and Bucky realizes that the tendrils are curling themselves about Steve’s wrists, elbows, coiling themselves around his arms like sheathes and lifting, until Steve’s arms are bound hand to elbow over his head. Steve’s chest rises and falls quickly, his breathing shaking. He doesn’t look afraid, but he’s beginning to look like he might soon be overwhelmed.

He looks up at Bucky, powerless, and shakes his head.

“What is it?” Bucky says softly, still leaning over him, lifting one hand to brush an imaginary strand from Steve’s forehead. “Whassamatter baby?” It’s so much easier to be himself from the outside of things like this.

Still, the coils shift up and back, up and back on Steve’s cock, slow enough that it looks like they’re squeezing the precome from the tip. The head of Steve’s cock is shiny and growing darker, and it always was well-defined.

“Hmm,” Bucky says, smiling down at him, and he reaches out and strokes the very tips of his fingers over the head of Steve’s cock. 

The smoke ripples, as though someone dropped a stone in a black pond, emanating from where Bucky touched him. The strands of voidsmoke pulse wider and then go thinner again, and Steve moans softly, eyes fluttering closed for a moment. They touch him all over his back and sides, all down the length of his arms and legs, inside and out, a roiling mass beneath him, holding him, and Bucky wonders at what else they might do, beneath the writhing massaging mass of the ones that cradle Steve’s balls. 

“Show me this, huh, sweetheart?” Bucky says, and runs his palm down the inside of Steve’s thigh. 

And it’s then that everything changes, that Bucky really sees how much Steve is in control of. Instead of Steve spreading his legs, instead of following Bucky’s movements, it’s almost as though Steve doesn’t do anything himself at all. Instead, he rises bodily off the bed, levitating, shoulders perhaps a foot higher than his hips so that he’s almost seated in mid air, and then his body - still surrounded by the curling black tendrils - arches in its swirling seat, bringing his hips downward as blackness circles his knee joints, spreading outward, down toward his ankles, up towards his hips. Then, in the same movement, the black limbs raise his legs at the knee and spread them outward, and Bucky stares at it all, at the living black snakes of them keeping Steve spread for him. 

Bucky sits up to better see Steve’s face, and then leans further, blood rushing downward as he takes in the spread of Steve’s legs and the pink flesh between them. The coils still stroke his cock almost lazily, and the writhing mass over his balls begins to shrink back until it divides one from the other in a cinch, a central line that moves upward between Steve’s balls to come back and curl around the base of his cock, all while the coils keep moving steadily, inexorably.

“Oh-h,” Steve says, his voice shaking, and Bucky watches the vulnerable furl clench down between his cheeks as two of the writhing black things spread Steve’s buttocks from beneath, watches the hesitant relaxation of it and tamps down the urge to put his mouth there. 

Steve looks almost anxious, but then he usually does if it feels good enough, and the things spread him wider by his legs, wider from beneath. 

One of the flickering black flames appears, kissing at the skin of Steve’s balls where the rope-like limbs surround them, pulling the skin tight, and Steve moans, there is a shift of his limbs - Bucky realizes he’s trying to fight against their hold and, for a moment, worries that Steve isn’t as in control as he seems, but then Bucky’s one, slender, curling black tendril reaches out to him and strokes over his wrist, and somehow he knows. Steve has control of these in a way, in much the same way that Bucky does. They’re together and separate at the same time, quenching desire while maintaining control - just like Steve is, just like Bucky is. 

Bucky doesn’t know how he knows it but, now that he’s in contact with them, with Steve and the limbs, with all of them, he knows - he wants to give Steve what Steve wants, and Steve wants to take it.

“Go on,” Bucky says, and he doesn’t know to whom he’s speaking, whether he’s telling the limbs or Steve or both, all. 

And, sure enough, no sooner has he said it than the flickering black flame between Steve’s legs elongates, thickens in body as the tip lengthens and narrows, perhaps to the breadth of a finger. Steve moans softly, well aware of it, and has time to give Bucky a sound of unbridled, half-terrified awe before it surges forward into him, strong and narrow and thickening even as Bucky watches. 

Steve can’t speak for a moment, his body going taut as his back arches and his head falls back, and then he groans long and rough from the middle of his chest.

“Fuck,” he says, voice breaking halfway through, “oh fuck, _fuck_ -” 

The limbs’ whole demeanor changes, all of them suddenly roiling even inside themselves, as though bubbles pulse beneath whatever ‘skin’ keeps them contained, as though the very stuff they’re made of shifts in and out of reality. The coils around Steve’s cock pull tight all of a sudden, and so do Steve’s limbs in their restraints as he gives a wordless cry. 

He watches the tip of the coil raise up and change in texture so that, instead of one smooth limb, it becomes pinched at intervals to form a line of tiny bulbs instead.

“Oh no,” Steve says, brow furrowed, lungs shaking, but Bucky sees him try and spread him legs wider even as the limbs hold him still. “Oh Buck,” but the little beaded tip of it hovers over the head of his cock and he nods, scrapes his teeth over his lower lip and thrusts upward into the coil so that the crown of his cock just kisses the tip of the limb. 

“Do you want it?” Bucky asks, because he has to know - it’s been so many years and this is so new to both of them and he daren’t just take his own perceptions as correct without making sure.

 _“Yes,”_ he moans, and the little beaded garland of a limb plunges downward into the tip of Steve’s cock.

The beads are _just_ too big, Bucky sees, the limb pushing downward regardless, and Steve groans with the effort of it until his body _jolts_ as the first one passes through.

“Oh, _God,_ ” he says, and then the next one has his body flinch, the next as he pulls at his restraints. 

When they’re all in, the coil goes still, and then Steve is suspended there, in the cradle that the limbs have made, the black restraints that love has put between them, and then the limb between Steve’s legs, buried deep inside of him, begins to grow. Bucky almost doesn’t see it at first, unsure momentarily why Steve’s breathing suddenly changes, why he twists, why suddenly he sounds as though he’s been squeezed by a giant fist. It pulses, a ring of thickness that travels down the length of the thing and, presumably, straight on down the length that’s sheathed in Steve. Bucky doesn’t realize that each one must leave it thicker until he realizes that the finger-width is now at least the girth of Steve’s cock. 

Steve makes soft, fragile little sounds, each one the same as the last-

“Ahn, ahn,” and Bucky takes in the scene they make, incredulous - incredulous at the breadth of Steve, Steve who lived, Steve who found him in this century and endured so much to be with him still - incredulous at the mass of black tendrils, that come from Steve and listen to Bucky like extensions of them both and creatures all their own - incredulous at his own presence, the years he lost and the pain he suffered: The soldier who found Steve in this century and endured so much to be with him, too. 

“I love you,” Bucky says, a ridiculous time to say it and yet the perfect time too.

The limb in Steve swells still further until it’s nearing a good percentage of the girth of Bucky’s wrist.

“Shh, sweetheart, shh,” he says, reaching out to wrap his hand around the limb that enters Steve, and everything slows, and slows, and stills, until the only sound is Steve’s breathing, and Bucky’s own heartbeat in his ears.

How strange that they don’t make a sound and yet the air was full of _something._ Nor a buzz, or a hum, but some sensation, some emanation of _life_ and _energy_ that’s gone quiet with the touch of Bucky’s hand.

“Kiss me,” Steve says, “Bucky, kiss me,” and Bucky was already moving after the first request, up onto his knees, shuffling close to slot his mouth over Steve’s.

Steve groans into his mouth, and Bucky rubs his thumb against the warm, smooth dryness. He hadn’t even thought about lube, but clearly none is needed. 

“Alright, sweetheart?” Bucky asks, and where is this confidence all the time? 

Still, he’s glad that he can show it now, that he feels it enough to be here for Steve. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, and leans close enough to press his forehead to Bucky’s forehead, to press his nose to Bucky’s cheek. 

Bucky strokes the limb with his thumb for a few more seconds, just for Steve to catch his breath, and then he shifts his head just slightly so that Steve knows to pull back, and smiles. 

“Alright,” he says softly. “Let go.”

And he’s not sure whose decision it is. Bucky doesn’t know if it’s his own, or Steve’s, or whatever part of Steve controls the limbs - perhaps it’s none of them, perhaps it’s all three. All Bucky is certain of is that it’s the right thing; the limbs move instantly. Gone are the loose coils and hesitant movements, the waiting and the preparation. The coils around Steve’s limbs hold him tight, the coil round his cock shifts fast enough that it looks liquid, and the limb inside him pulses and throbs and thrusts and thrusts, and Steve cries out over the not-audible hum of it, of the effluence of hard work that the voidsmoke tendrils exude. 

Steve is held fast and so held at its mercy, and Bucky watches him fight his own body’s pleasure as it builds inside of him. He almost feels it himself - almost - some strange connection through the limb that touches him that warms his blood and stirs his senses. The limbs piston in and out of him so rapidly that Bucky’s eyes can barely make sense of it, and Steve shakes himself, turns his head away as his mouth falls open, his eyes shutting tightly. He gives a cry, that’s followed by another, louder cry, both of helpless desperation, and then, the limbs working harder than ever, there is a beautiful, crystal clear moment of silence as the universe holds it breath for them.

“Bucky,” he whispers, and then Steve’s crying out his release, pulling against the limbs that bind him as the coiled limb retreats enough for him to come up the length of his body in thick, white ropes.

They go up past his shoulder, splattering against the underside of his jaw, and then the side of his temple as his breath catches and his head rolls to one side. 

He gives a few broken, half-curtailed gasps, and goes silent, shaking. His body flinches, his head comes forward and he pulls against the tendrils and then, finally, the muscles in his thighs quiver, then shake, then flex, and then still. 

Steve pants open-mouthed, his limbs gone lax in their living restraints, and, slowly, they lower him back to the bed, narrowing to slip easily from his body, curling back to be a bed of smoke once more. 

He’s shaking, Bucky notes. Shivering, as though he’s caught a chill.

Bucky leans over him once more, strokes his hand through Steve’s hair while caring about the errant semen not at all. They’ll shower later, they’ll clean the bedsheets later, all of it can wait.

It’s a moment or two, Steve panting rapidly as his body recovers, before his gaze finds Bucky’s own.

“Hi,” Bucky says

“Uhn,” Steve answers weakly, and Bucky kisses him, soft and sweet and slow the way Steve kisses him when he’s had a bad dream, or when he hasn’t slept, or when he needs the comfort that Steve has always been best at providing him with. 

He breaks the kiss and settles down beside Steve - something that strong will need a rest before they doing anything else, that much is certain - and he brings Steve’s head to his chest, does his best to pull Steve’s body toward him, and Steve obliges with what little strength he’s got left. 

“You feel good?” Bucky murmurs into the top of his head, and Steve’s arms circle his torso slowly, mindful of Bucky’s comfort the way he always is.

“Hmmmmm,” Steve answers, breath warm against Bucky’s collarbone.

“Good,” Bucky says and then, because he knows Steve will be thinking about it, addresses the thought he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. “That looked a lot of fun. I think, if we go slow, I might want to work up to that.”

“Hmmm, love you,” Steve answers, the words smudged together like paint on canvas, _“we all do.”_

Bucky smiles, and pulls up the covers to keep the sweat evaporating off Steve’s body from turning cold in what remains of the night. Then he holds out a hand to the resting tendrils and waits for the one limb that knows him, the tendril that always finds him, to reach out in return. Then, knowing how purely because it feels the right way to do it, he brings the limb back, across his waist, and doesn’t flinch when the other rise too - something shared, and something safe, a cocoon for both of them.

“I know, my sweethearts,” he whispers back in the dark, as the limbs and Steve hold him close. “I love all of you too.”


End file.
